Share This Story!

Frontier's latest focus city attempt is Wilmington, Del.

Frontier will make Delaware's biggest city its latest focus city as the low-cost carrier continues to try experiment with its route map. The airline announced on Monday that its service to the New Castle

The airline announced on Monday that its service to the New Castle County Airport near Wilmington will begin July 1. Frontier will fly four weekly flights to its main hub of Denver and three flights a week to both Chicago Midway and Houston Hobby. To Orlando, Frontier will fly twice a week. On July 4, Frontier will add two weekly flights to Tampa. A number of connecting options will be available via Denver.

With the new service, Frontier will be the only airline offering regularly scheduled commercial flights to Delaware. The state has been without service on a major carrier since Delta ended its brief experiment at Wilmington in 2007. Skybus, a self-described ultra-low-cost airline, also flew to Wilmington as recently as 2008 before going out of business.

The New Castle airport is less than 30 miles south of Philadelphia International and about 75 miles northeast of Baltimore/Washington International.

"Customers who fly Frontier from (Wilmington) can skip congested and expensive alternative hubs in the region and enjoy quick, convenient, low-fare travel to great destinations," Shurz says in Frontier's press release.

"If all people know is flying through Philadelphia, they don't know how easy travel can be," Shurz adds to The News Journal of Wilmington. "It's a small, convenient airport, and it has low costs. You can park your car, walk 150 to 200 yards, and you're at your gate."

However, Frontier's attempt to transform Wilmington into a focus city comes as the carrier has struggled to find a stable route map.

Squeezed in its main Denver hub by both United and Southwest, Frontier has been quick to add and drop routes -- even hubs.

The carrier axed the Milwaukee and Kansas City hubs it inherited with its acquisition of now-defunct Midwest Airlines, and has had mixed success in creating new focus cities that would reduce the carrier's dependence on the ultra-competitive Denver market.

As part of that, Frontier has made various attempts in recent years to establish secondary bases at a number of cities. Some have stuck (Orlando) while others have not (Colorado Springs). And the jury is still out on another --Trenton, N.J.

But in announcing its new Delaware service, Frontier has given the impression that the Trenton service is working by saying it hopes to "duplicate its success at Trenton-Mercer Airport" -- which itself is only about 70 miles from Wilmington.

And, like in Wilmington, Frontier's entrance to Trenton has made it the only carrier to offer regularly scheduled commercial service at that airport. Industry observers have speculated that airports like Trenton and Wilmington may be attractive to Frontier because they are airports near big metro areas that have no direct competition but also are unlikely to attract new service from rivals such as United and Southwest.

Still, Frontier's spotty track record with staying power is hard to overlook for some -- even as it expands to Wilmington.

On that point, the News Journal writes "local leaders expressed excitement about Frontier's arrival, but aviation industry observers expressed varying degrees of doubt about whether commercial air service here could be viable."

"I would be concerned about booking these flights for fear that they try it for three months, it doesn't work and they stop service," Jay Sorensen, president of the IdeaWorksCompany aviation consultancy, says to the newspaper.

But Shurz insists Wilmington fits in with Frontier's plans to develop new markets in which the company can take advantage of population concentrations and offer alternatives to relatively high fares in the private aviation market.

"We're targeting primarily leisure customers," Shurz says. "... It makes access to these great destinations more convenient and certainly more affordable."

And Frontier was quick to point out that the Wilmington plans aren't coming at the expense of Trenton.

"I don't think there will be any negative impact in Trenton," Frontier spokeswoman Kate O'Malley tells The Times of Trenton.